[The Exiled]

15W TDP mobile Intel Core i5-8250U (4C/8T) vs. 15W TDP mobile AMD Ryzen 5 2500U (4C/8T)

Watt for watt, the Core i5-8250U thoroughly outclasses its Kaby Lake predecessor in every test we can throw at it. The i5-8250U delivers a whopping 59% mean performance improvement over its predecessor when I take all of my tests into account. Heavy multithreaded workloads, and especially heavy AVX workloads, will drive the Core i5-8250U to its base clock faster than you can say "SIMD," but even with its low 1.6-GHz base speed, Kaby Lake-R offers a major boost in performance over the i5-7200U in those tasks. By themselves, eighth-generation Core CPUs don't do much to move the integrated-graphics bar. If you want more graphics horsepower from an eighth-gen ultrabook, though, you can get one with a GeForce MX150 graphics chip and 2GB of dedicated GDDR5 RAM inside for not much more money than models without. If gaming performance matters, the Nvidia chip offers solid enough frame rates and frame times in some of today's most popular games, sometimes even at 1920x1080 with some eye candy on.

AMD Ryzen 5 2500U quad-core mobile processor we tested generally offered competitive performance to Intel's latest 8th Gen quad-core Kaby Lake-R offering in various, highly-refined and optimized machines like the Dell XPS 13 and the HP Spectre x360. Presumably, a Ryzen 7 2700U would look even better in a similar match-up, with a bit more top-end clock speed. Looking at Ryzen Mobile's graphics prowess, as we hoped, the platform offers significantly better performance with its Vega 8 IGP in comparison to Intel's latest UHD 620 IGP in the 8th Gen Core series line-up. In some tests it offered 60 - 70 percent faster frame rates and was able to make unplayable titles playable at 1080p. The early indicators for AMD's Ryzen Mobile platform are strong, both on the CPU and GPU side of the equation. With respect to battery life, however, the picture for us is still pretty murky and we're going to reserve judgement for now.

Izvor: The Tech Report i HotHardware